DECODING VI­RAL BE­HAV­IOUR

New re­search de­vel­oped in Qatar by Dr Javier Borge-Holthoe­fer, a sci­en­tist at Qatar Com­put­ing Re­search In­sti­tute has shown that peo­ple be­have like schools of fish or flocks of birds when events go vi­ral on so­cial me­dia. The re­search, led by QCRI, with col­lab­o­ra­tion from North­east­ern Univer­sity, the Cen­ter for Data Science ( New York Univer­sity) and the Univer­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia, analy­ses how col­lec­tive at­ten­tion builds on Twit­ter. They stud­ied five dif­fer­ent events as they un­folded on Twit­ter: the Span­ish 15M protests, the Ou­tono Brasileiro (Brazil­ian au­tumn) move­ment, the an­nounce­ment of the Higgs bo­son discovery, the re­lease of a Hol­ly­wood block­buster movie, “The Dark Knight Rises” and the ac­qui­si­tion of Mo­torola by Google.